Alejandro Duque

Real Estate Private Equity Management. Previously Google, UF grad.

[Jeffrey Emanuel @doodlestein]

For the past two years, I’ve been stressing the paramount importance of the planning process in agentic software development. It’s where I spend 90%+ of my human time and energy. I saw this quote from the engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge that explains why it’s truer now than ever:

[Don Pettit @astro_Pettit]

Miami, Florida as seen from the ISS in 2025. This city has changed tremendously since my previous mission, replacing its yellow-orange sodium vapor lights with multi-colored LEDs. The city grid really pops! This LED takeover of city lighting is world wide.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Don’t fall for the fake Fox/GOP outrage. Two weeks ago the House passed a bill that greenlighted the transfer of Spanish territory to Morocco. Every Republican except me voted for it, but now THEY are acting shocked at the invasion.
https://t.co/a7ROEAtoOD
https://t.co/886sJycfeL

[Alejandro Duque @droduque]

💣💣💣

[kristen shaughnessy @kshaughnessy2]

Classic Friday evening news drop

Blackstone’s $78B private credit co-CEO resigns on Monday.… company waits until after-hours Friday to announce.

“Jonathan Bock, co-chief executive officer of Blackstone Inc.’s flagship $78 billion private credit fund, is leaving the firm, according to a filing Friday….

Bock also resigned as co-CEO of Blackstone Secured Lending Fund….

His exit comes after Katherine Rubenstein, the chief operating officer of the BCRED fund leftlast month….”

[Micky @Rasmic]

Thank GPT 5.6 Sol and Kimi K3 for making this all happen

Fable 5 is #1

[Alejandro Duque @droduque]

Fable is incredible. Expensive and worth it. Wow @AnthropicAI

[Nathan Webb @NathanDWebb]

What is a Real Estate Equity Marketing Meeting?

Unlike traditional sales techniques and MLS listings that only look at price and cash, these sessions focus entirely on property equity and the owner's specific situation.

Here is how it works 👇
1/ The "Have" vs. "Want" Model
Instead of just listing a property, we look at the puzzle: What does the client have, and what do they need or want to improve their life? The result? Multiple creative offers and formulas that unlock a true win-win for everyone.

2/ The Traditional Hurdles
Until now, these high-level rooms have been hard to access for the uninitiated
• 🗣️ We speak a fast, complex industry language
• ✈️ Meetings are in-person (heavy travel/time costs)
• 🫰 They are invitation-only and come with association fees

3/ Breaking Down the Barriers
We are changing the game. We've eliminated these roadblocks to bring collaborative, live deal-making to everyone.
Here is what we did:
• 🌐 Combined multiple local chapters into one virtual monthly meeting
• 🆓 Made it 100% free for brokers, investors, and exchangors
• 🎓 Created a moderated format that educates through real-world examples

Are you a broker or investor located or operating in the Southeast? DM me and you might just find yourself in the room.

[Jill Tucker @jilltucker]

And at the watch party you will ask the organizer if he’s from Cape Verde. He will say yes, from Praia. And you’ll say oh! I lived there for two years. I was a teacher. And he will ask, “What’s your name?” You will tell him and he will say, “You were my teacher.”

[Alejandro Duque @droduque]

"Importantly, human capital does not become less valuable as token capital grows. It only becomes more valuable!" 100%

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[Alejandro Duque @droduque]

🐐🐐🐐

[MisterChip (Alexis) @2010MisterChip]

‼️ RÉCORD HISTÓRICO ‼️

Con su hat-trick ante Argelia, Lionel Messi 🇦🇷 llega a 16 goles en TODA la historia de la Copa del Mundo e IGUALA a Miroslav Klose 🇩🇪 como MÁXIMO goleador histórico del torneo.

🇦🇷 LIONEL MESSI: 16
🇩🇪 Miroslav Klose: 16
🇧🇷 Ronaldo Nazário: 15
🇩🇪 Gerd Müller: 14
🇫🇷 Kylian Mbappé: 14
🇫🇷 Just Fontaine: 13
🇧🇷 Pelé: 12

[Conor Sen @conorsen]

@TheStalwart I’m generally not a fan of “This is the fastest adoption ever” but increasing a revenue run-rate from $9bn/year to $44bn/year in 5 months is just insane.

[Alejandro Duque @droduque]

18. The most underrated asset a human can have in 2026: the ability to sit in a room with another human, make eye contact, and have a real conversation. As AI handles more of the transactional stuff, the humans who can do the relational stuff become disproportionately valuable. The soft skills people used to dismiss as fluffy are becoming the hard skills. The hard skills people spent decades acquiring are becoming the soft ones.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

My 30+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now:

And some ideas that are keeping me up at night.

1. The new buyer on the internet is an AI agent. Imagine billions of new customers showing up with money to spend but they only shop via MCP. That's what's happening. No MCP server means you're invisible to the fastest growing buyer on the internet.

2. Every franchise system in America (30,000+) needs an agent layer and none of them have one. One founder per franchise vertical. That's 30,000 businesses waiting.

3. Everyone said "distribution is the only moat" a year ago. Now I'd add that the only moat is distribution plus memory. The company that has your audience AND your agent's accumulated context is impossible to leave.

4. Consumer mobile is more interesting than it's been since 2012. Apps can finally DO things for you instead of showing you things. The next wave of $100M apps are being built right now.

5. The most interesting startup nobody has built is an agent marketplace where you rent access to someone else's trained agent. A recruiter spent 6 months training a sourcing agent on healthcare hiring. That agent is worth renting to every other healthcare recruiter on earth. The agent itself becomes the product.

6. A sorta strange phenomenon that's happening right now is agents are developing preferences. Give the same agent the same task 100 times and it starts developing patterns in how it approaches it. Nobody is studying this yet. But the agents that develop good patterns are worth more than the ones that don't. That's a new kind of asset.

7. Dead internet theory is about to become dead SaaS theory. Half the apps you use will quietly replace their support team, their onboarding team, and their content team with agents. You won't notice for months. Then you'll realize you haven't talked to a human at that company in a year.

8. The most valuable data in the world right now is sitting in the support tickets of small or mid tier SaaS companies. Every ticket is a customer telling you exactly what to build next. Mine this.

9. The most interesting pricing problem nobody has solved is how do you price a product when your costs change every time OpenAI or Anthropic updates their model pricing? Your margins can swing 40% overnight based on a decision made in San Francisco. The company that builds dynamic pricing infrastructure for agent-based businesses solves a problem every AI company has.

10. The best AI products feel like they're reading your mind. The worst ones feel like filling out a form with extra steps.

11. An interesting arbitrage I've noticed lately is hiring a human VA for $20/hour to supervise an AI agent that does $200/hour work. The human just checks the output.

12. The managed AI agent business is becoming the new agency model. $5k/month per client. You build it, run it, maintain it. The client gets a digital employee they never have to think about. This will be a $50 B+ category.

13. The first "shadow agent" scandals are about to drop. Employees running personal agents on company infrastructure without telling anyone. Using company API keys. Agents accessing internal docs. IT departments have little visibility into this right now. Lots of opportunity to build companies here. Definitely a painkiller not a vitamin type of business.

14. Right now there are probably millions of agents running on autopilot that their creators forgot about. Still burning tokens. Still sending emails. Still scraping websites. Still costing money. The "find and kill your zombie agents" tool is a product that writes itself.

15. Companies are starting to hire based on someone's agent portfolio instead of their resume. "Show me 3 agents you built that are running right now." It's REALLY early but it's starting.

16. Your Slack archive is a product. Every company's internal Slack has thousands of messages explaining how they actually do things. The company that lets you point an agent at your Slack history and auto-generate SOPs and agents from it will be enormous.

17. We're watching the cost of intelligence fall faster than the cost of distribution. Which means distribution is now the expensive thing.

18. The most underrated asset a human can have in 2026: the ability to sit in a room with another human, make eye contact, and have a real conversation. As AI handles more of the transactional stuff, the humans who can do the relational stuff become disproportionately valuable. The soft skills people used to dismiss as fluffy are becoming the hard skills. The hard skills people spent decades acquiring are becoming the soft ones.

19. There are MANY huge companies to be built around the fact that most people's agents are running on their personal laptops which they also use to browse the internet, check email, and download random files. The attack surface is enormous. One compromised Chrome extension and your agent's API keys, customer data, and workflows are exposed.

20. There's a new type of burnout forming that doesn't have a name. It's not from working too hard. It's from context switching between human work and agent work 50 times a day. Reviewing agent output, correcting it, approving it, reviewing again. The mental load of supervising agents is different from the mental load of doing the work yourself. Some founders are telling me they were less tired when they did everything manually because at least the cognitive pattern was consistent.

21. The cheapest form of market research: search "[your industry] spreadsheet template" on Google. Whatever people are tracking manually is your product.

22. Half the YC companies pivoted within 8 weeks of demo day. Not because they failed. Because agents let them test 5 ideas in the time it used to take to test one. The concept of "committing to an idea" is dissolving. Serial pivoting is becoming the default because 1) AI lets you move fast 2) the world is moving fast.

23. The loneliest job in tech right now is being the only person at your company who understands what the agents are doing. You can't explain it to your boss. You can't hand it off to a colleague. If you leave, everything breaks. You've become a single point of failure for an entire automated system. That person needs a title, a team, and a backup plan. Most companies haven't figured this out yet.

24. Your browser history is the most valuable training data you own and you're giving it away for free. Every site you visit, every product you research, every competitor you study, every pricing page you screenshot. That behavioral data, structured and fed to an agent, would make it understand your business better than any onboarding call. The company that lets you turn your browser history into agent context builds something nobody can replicate.

25. Everyone is building AI wrappers. Nobody is building AI unwrappers. The tool that takes an AI-generated document and tells you which parts a human wrote and which parts were generated.

26. Stripe just became the most important company in the agent economy and they barely had to do anything. Every agent that sells something needs Stripe. Every agent that buys something needs Stripe. They're the payment rail for the entire agentic internet by default.

27. The most undervalued API in the world right now is the US Postal Service address verification API. It's practically free. Every local business lead gen agent needs it. Every real estate agent needs it. Every direct mail agent needs it. Boring government infrastructure is quietly becoming the backbone of agent-native businesses.

28. The concept of "business hours" is for humans. Your agent closed a deal in Tokyo at 3am, processed the payment, sent the onboarding email, and updated the CRM before your alarm went off.

29. What happens when agents start recommending other agents? Your research agent finds that a competitor's sales agent is better and suggests you switch. Agent referral networks are forming organically. The first agent affiliate program is probably 6 months away.

30. Cal dotcom closed their source code. That's the canary. When open source companies start closing up, it means agents were cloning their product too easily. Every open source company is quietly asking the same question right now.

31. "AI for pet groomers" sounds like a joke and that's exactly why it will work. 150,000 of them in America. Zero tech. All scheduling by phone or IG DMs. The joke ideas always win.

32. The thing that will seem most obvious in hindsight: we spent 2025-2026 arguing about which model is best while the entire value was in the orchestration layer. The model is the CPU. Nobody buys a computer based on the CPU anymore. They buy it based on what they can do with it. Makes so much sense in hindsight. What else will be obvious in hindsight?

I'll share more notes soon.

I can't sleep with all that's going on. Maybe you too.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Chris Chavez @ChrisChavez]

Here are Sabastian Sawe's splits en route to the 1:59:30 marathon world record. 🤯

He ran the first half in 1:00:29 and then the second half in 59:01. My goodness!

Splits — Time (Segment) — Pace (min/mile)
5K — 14:14 (14:14) — 4:35
10K — 28:35 (14:21) — 4:37
15K — 43:10 (14:35) — 4:40
20K — 57:21 (14:11) — 4:35
Half Marathon — 1:00:29 — 4:36
25K — 1:11:41 (14:20) — 4:37
30K — 1:26:03 (14:22) — 4:37
35K — 1:39:57 (13:54) — 4:28
40K — 1:53:39 (13:42) — 4:25
Finish — 1:59:30 (5:51) — 4:17

Just incredible.

[Jeffrey Gundlach @TruthGundlach]

A bottom tier sponsor just marked down its Red Lobster equity position 98% OVERNIGHT. Oddly, that equity position was in a “private credit” fund. Disturbingly, that fund’s large Red Lobster debt holding is marked at par, even though the equity was basically wiped out OVERNIGHT.

RUN!!!

[Christopher Bloomstran @ChrisBloomstran]

ARK Invest published its 2021 “research” report on Tesla, thoughtfully estimating metrics on where the car company would be in five years. The results are in. Turns out Cathie & Co were just a tad bit optimistic in their forecasting skill. That was sarcasm. The scorecard: 1/

[Jeffrey Gundlach @TruthGundlach]

In 2007, I was sitting on a large amount of undrawn commitments to invest in bombed out MBS securities.

Didn’t invest at all until 2008, didn’t get fully invested until March 2009.

It’s 2007 for Private Credit.

Come home to DoubleLine.

[Eric Berger @SciGuySpace]

Epic launch of SLS and Orion. So much better in the daytime to observe. Congratulations to NASA and everyone involved. Y’all made us proud.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

sequoia put out a blog post called "services is the new software"

look at this map of over $1T in services being replaced by AI agents

[spor @sporadica]

RIP Sora, you gave us the greatest ai video of all time

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet.

1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output.

The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice.

Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.

And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”

This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one.

We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.

The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.